A Lawyer’s Long Journey Across the Thin Blue Line

Gabriella Navarro Busch did her 20 years as an Oxnard police dispatcher. She raised two daughters with only the help of her mother. Then, finally she allowed herself the luxury of her dreams.

“I had to become a lawyer,” she said. So she worked days and studied nights.

Now, Gabby Busch, 41, is working her first legal case on behalf of the mother of Robert Jones, a distraught 23-year-old who was fatally shot in August by Oxnard police while holding a knife and hiding in his closet.

“I just sat there the next day after Rob was killed and talked with his mother. I saw a lot of me in her,” Busch said. “Her oldest daughter is married and has a great life and her younger child [Jones] went off to college and was an artist and a poet and a really great person.”

Busch asked Jones’ mother, Ida Perkins, for a photo of her son to put on Busch’s desk.

“It’s kind of a daily inspiration to remind me,” Busch said, “that I’m trying to help this good lady and make some sense out of this mess.”

In taking on the Oxnard Police Department, Busch has made rivals of old friends.

Indeed, after she retired as the department’s chief dispatcher last year, she thought about applying with its top lawyer, Alan Wisotsky. She’d been a key witness for him over the years.

Now, instead of working with the county’s foremost police attorney, she’s opposing him.

“I’ve always respected him,” she said. “It’s going to be a challenge.”

Not that she hasn’t had plenty of challenges already.

Born in Mexico, a mother twice and divorced by age 18, Gabriella had few choices in her early life once she became pregnant in high school.

“I did well in school, but I was married when I was 15,” she said. Gabriella took a semester off, although she said a Channel Islands High School administrator encouraged her to drop out because she would set a bad example for the other girls.

“I graduated with my class because I didn’t want to be yet another statistic, and I wanted to prove that administrator wrong,” she said. “I didn’t think what he said was right. So I defended myself. And I thought at the time, ‘I should be a lawyer.’ ”

That notion already had occurred to her because of the words and actions of one inspiring teacher, Gloria Barrios.

“She had us read a lot of books that inspired us not to judge other people--about Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X,” Busch said. “Then one day, she announced that this would be her last week, because she had been admitted to law school, and now she was going to help change society.”

Busch recently tracked down her old teacher, who had indeed become a lawyer. “I wanted her to know she inspired me. She ended up offering me a job.”

Consider that a suitable footnote to Gabriella Busch’s 25-year climb past daunting obstacles--her father’s death following alcoholism and depression, her mother’s death at 45 from a chronic heart problem and the responsibilities of being a single mother.

“I just did my best to make sure my two daughters didn’t repeat the same cycle [as their mother],” she said.

It worked. Her older daughter, Delia Navarro Abarca, 25, graduated from high school, attended community college, is married and works for an Oxnard pediatrician. Her younger daughter, Monika Navarro, 23, is set to graduate next spring with a bachelor’s degree in art from Tufts University and the Boston School of Museum and Fine Arts.

Gabriella scaled early hurdles with a foot in the door as a part-time Police Department employee. When 17, she enrolled in a program that introduced promising students to college. She took Oxnard College classes in the morning, worked with police in the afternoon and was paid for the whole day.

By age 20, Gabriella was a full-time Oxnard police dispatcher. And with her mom, Hortenzia Garcia, watching her daughter’s young girls, she soon earned her community college degree.

After her children were teenagers, Gabriella enrolled in the Ventura College of Law and passed the California Bar exam about five years ago. She remained manager of the 26-employee Oxnard dispatch center until a $3-million high-tech reconstruction was complete and she was vested as a 20-year retiree.

This year, after working for a Westlake company specializing in emergency alert systems, Busch was tabbed by Oxnard lawyer Greg Ramirez for the Jones case because other commitments created a conflict of interest for him.

“She will grow into a first-rate attorney, because it’s very rare to find attorneys who have street smarts and a big heart,” Ramirez said.

Busch is working with Samuel Paz and Sonia Mercado, two top Los Angeles lawyers who specialize in civil rights cases against police.

“They’re amazingly good,” Busch said. “And this case goes where I want my career to be: I want to be a great immigration lawyer and to pursue cases involving violations of civil rights.”

She also wants to force more change in the Oxnard Police Department, which since the Jones shooting has begun to train officers better in how to deal with mentally disturbed crime suspects. Oxnard police have shot six suspects this year, killing five, including Jones. Most were mentally disturbed. Five of the shootings were justified, county prosecutors have found. The Jones investigation is not complete.

“These officers have to repeatedly qualify at the shooting range,” Busch said. “But they don’t have to qualify on the use of nonlethal equipment. So when officers are faced with danger, they are going to go with what they feel most comfortable with. That’s why they shoot.”

As Busch has entered her second career, she’s had a second chance with marriage as well. She married Santa Paula deer rancher Peter Busch 2 1/2 years ago, and they live in Ventura.